Mobilise. Disrupt. Lead.
Don't be an Incumbent...be an Insurgent
We exist at the intersection of strategy, innovation and leadership to help organisations to discover ways to transform disruption into a source of permanent competitive advantage.
What We Do
We are a next generation innovation and strategy consultancy.
STRATEGY DESIGN
AND EXECUTION
In an increasingly unstable world a new approach to strategy is required. We bring fresh thinking and proprietary methods that will help your organisation create an unfair advantage. Our innovative hyper-mobilisation approach to strategy execution will help you get there first.
INNOVATION
In today’s environment, Innovation is critical to success. Insurgents apply innovation to reshape industry boundaries whilst incumbents stand helpless on the sidelines. Insurgence can help you harness your innovation efforts to build and sustain new sources of competitive advantage.
LEADERSHIP
The era of command and control hierarchical leadership is coming to an end giving way to a new generation of horizontal leadership approaches designed for the agile and nimble age we live in. Is your leadership team ready for this change?
EXPERT
FACILITATION
Insurgence facilitation is different. We will help you and your team rethink the boundaries, rules and assumptions that define your position in the marketplace. We will challenge you to be better. Better leaders, better competitors, better participants in the world we live in.
How We Work
CLIENT ENABLEMENT
Our consulting philosophy is different. We believe that in order to help our clients to achieve their goals, we have to find your best and brightest people and enable them with the skills and mindset to think and work differently.
CO-CREATION
We will help you think differently about your network of customers suppliers and other stakeholders using co-creation to accelerate insight, buy-in and results.
DIVERGENT THINKING
Our creative design process requires viewing problems in fundamentally different ways to find solutions that help our clients to leave behind embedded assumptions holding them back from achieving the impossible.
INTELLIGENT SIMPLICITY
The best solutions always seem simple and elegant. Achieving this simplicity requires bringing together thoughtful design with deep insights.
Insurgence: How Established Incumbents Can Operate Like Nimble Insurgents in Fast Changing and Volatile Markets
Kindle and Hardcover 1st Edition
This book enables business leaders to characterise the difference between incumbents and insurgents, develop new ways of thinking about how to compete in this age of accelerating change, and provide a new framework for strategy and innovation that helps leaders to discover the essence of insurgence for their businesses. It uses rich case studies that illustrate both successful and unsuccessful efforts to help leaders move from theory to action at speed and at scale.
Client Voices
"In my (too many) decades of being a CEO, I have had the privilege of seeing many consultants undertake planning sessions, and I have rarely seen a facilitator who brought so many insights, experience and vision to the process. Matt managed all the 'personalities', views and expectations exceptionally well, and the outcomes of the session will provide us with a clear strategic direction for the future."
Catherine Dale, Board Chair, Montsalvat
“Matthew’s approach and attention to detail was the key ingredients to a very successful go to market review for Capsifi. The professionalism and research that went into our company, encompassing the environment that Capsifi competes, gave the executive team a renewed sense of destination and achievement. Very productive body of work that will be leveraged and enhanced over time.”
Ian McAdam, CEO, Capsifi
“Our business had experienced significant rapid growth over a short period of time. To ensure healthy and sustainable growth for our company, we engaged Insurgence Group to assist us with developing a five-year business strategy. Bringing a wealth of knowledge and experience, Matt challenged and flipped our way of thinking and was instrumental in guiding us through the development of our strategy. Focusing us on the immediate need of the business while setting key milestones to ensure the business is transformed for the future.”
Tim Strong, CEO, Waterline.
“I would like to extend our deepest gratitude to Matt Tice and the team at Insurgence Group for their exemplary work in guiding us through the development of our strategic plan. The comprehensive three-round strategy development process that Matt meticulously led, not only encompassed feedback from a range of stakeholders, but also included board facilitations and management offsites. His unwavering support to our executive team was instrumental in crystallising our vision for the future. The value he has brought to our retail group, as evidenced by the cohesive and robust strategy in place, is truly commendable. I look forward to future collaborations and commend his dedication, expertise, and support.”
Anthony Coelho, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Marquee Retail Group
“Thank you for challenging us and providing strategic foresight that has helped us make the right decisions for our business, this has helped us stay ahead of the curve. Working with you and your team at Insurgence Group has been a pleasure, due to your collaborative and accommodating approach.”
Paley Ho, Founder & Managing Director, Unios
The team at Insurgence Group, led by Matt Tice, provided us with a new perspective on our association's professional development business model. Their approach helped us to stay relevant and sustainable in the future. The work was a highly collaborative effort, with a member-focused approach. We were able to discuss practical concepts that could be implemented into our 3-year plan and were able to quickly turn the resulting plan into action, introducing new and innovative concepts within in just a few months. Working with Insurgence Group was an educational opportunity that improved our ability to deliver a workable strategic plan effectively. I highly recommend Insurgence Group as a valuable resource for associations looking to modernise and future-proof their business models.
Erin Menywweather, Professional Development Team Leader, ESSA
"We have worked with many consultants in the past but the way you [Insurgence] pushed us to go further and develop our thinking to explore our future and challenge ourselves to change was well beyond. I can’t thank you enough.”
Sally Grimsley-Ballard General Manager
"Matt Tice [and his team] have been with us from the beginning of our growth journey providing invaluable strategic counsel to help us grow more than 50x over five years and evolve from a small local player to a truly global enterprise operating on four continents. Insurgence brings a unique combination of strategic insight combined with an absolute dedication to client success. As our journey continues we will continue to draw upon the innovative and creative input that sets Insurgence apart from other advisors.”
Nigel Pollard, Chief Executive Officer, Soho Flordis International
“The Insurgence team brought us a completely fresh look at innovation and challenged our team to think in very different ways about the role of innovation in our organisation. The unique way the Insurgence model brings innovation together with strategy and leadership was novel and insightful, but at the same time simple and easy to understand. The depth and breadth of their knowledge on the topic was vast and helped my team break down some of our fundamental assumptions in a practical and engaging way”
Sean Ventris, Head of Legal, CSR Limited
“The team at Insurgence worked with us to develop our channel strategy at a time of significant change in our organisation. This effort helped us think fundamentally differently about how we go-to-market, our relevance to members and the resilience of our business model. This will help us achieve the critical but difficult balance between value to our members and economic sustainability. My team thoroughly enjoyed the process and came out of the effort with new skills that they can apply in their careers at FINSIA and beyond. Along the way Matt Tice, in particular, has been invaluable as a leadership coach for me in my role, first General Manager, Commercial and, more recently, as Chief Executive Officer.”
Jane Endacott, Chief Executive Officer, FINSIA
I have worked with Matt Tice over nearly 15 years across four companies, each time to help me shape strategy, create alignment in the organisation and execute against very aggressive goals many people in each organisation thought were impossible to achieve. Most recently at IDP, the team at Insurgence helped us to shape our strategy and innovate our business model as we participate in the market for the first time as a newly listed company. The “no excuses” style combined with a genuine passion for client success and results helps make Insurgence standout from other firms.”
Andrew Barkla, Chief Executive Officer, IDP
“Upon receiving a recommendation from a trusted business partner, we engaged Insurgence to help us define our winning strategy and value proposition at a critical point in our history as a company. Insurgence gave us a new language for strategy and helped us to rapidly achieve unified clarity as a leadership team and position the business to execute on a growth strategy that will help us grow the business more than 3x in the coming three years. The Insurgence team was easy to work with and not afraid to challenge our thinking to help us get there”
Sam Bastounas, Chief Executive Officer, Axieo
"Matt Tice and the team at Insurgence helped us, at a critical time in the history of the organisation and an unprecedented time of change in our industry, to confront our role in the market as an established incumbent and to think differently about how we play and win in the future. Insurgence brought us a practical language and a simple way of thinking about strategy. Matt worked with our top 100 leaders to help sharpen our focus on current and emerging customer needs and to build buy-in and consensus on our approach to winning in our key markets. The way Insurgence worked with us enabled our internal team to build sufficient understanding of the tools and processes to take ownership and responsibility for their continued use to drive strategy through to results."
Michael Thomas, Chief Operating Officer, TAFE Queensland
"Matt is an outstanding speaker and presenter on strategy. He was able to hold the audience’s attention and give them tremendous value. Everyone took home ideas which will make their organisation’s better and more effective. If you have a chance to see Matt....don’t miss it!"
Jerry Kleeman, TEC Chairman TEC 53, KEY 106
“Matt has been central to pushing us to progress, think outside the box and extending ourselves beyond what we know and/or feel comfortable exploring. He is a wealth of knowledge, and the team has certainly gained a lot from working with him.”
Dwayne Crombie, MD, Health Services Bupa Australia Health Pty Ltd
“Insurgence was instrumental in helping us build a bold strategy to create breakout growth and position our business as one of the undisputed leaders in the industry”
Jim Angelis, CEO, Coverforce
"Matt and the team at Insurgence were fundamental in ensuring our organisation had the opportunity to not only survive but to thrive in the new economy. They went over and above in working with our teams and community to bring about real change in our business model, product set and delivery. Best of all, unlike many consulting companies, they open-sourced their thinking, became part of our team and taught us how to innovate now and into the future. I can’t recommend them highly enough."
Manisha Amin, CEO, Centre for Inclusive Design
Insurgence Group LLC deserves the highest accolades for its work with companies seeking growth in a disruptive environment. I know because I hired Insurgence Group LLC to work with me to create and communicate a disruptive strategy for my organization. As the then new head of US training and development at a global pharmaceutical company, I sought to transform the division, from its traditional, top-down training role to the enabler of a bottoms-up learning culture, where employees own their learning journey. I was able to achieve this because Insurgence Group was an excellent external partner. Because of its strategic expertise and highly adaptive way of working, Insurgence Group quickly became a trusted collaborator and go-to sounding board in this effort. Insurgence Group’s keen questioning, process facilitation skills and insightful analyses proved essential to challenge and enhance the overarching strategy. Insurgence Group is a highly professional, creative, and innovative team that is brilliant, responsive, fun, and easy to work with. With their sound, expert guidance, my team prepared our commercial businesses to compete effectively and achieve enterprise sales goals in an evolving health care marketplace.
Caroline DeMarco Former VP, Selling & Marketing Excellence, Commercial Capabilities Top 10 Pharmaceutical Company
"Rondo Moses became a trusted advisor of ours in the area of strategy development and strategy execution. He and the Insurgence Group team have the level of expertise and competence in this field to listen, truly listen, to the unique challenges (and personalities) that exist within the organization, and then co-create an approach that will work. It takes a seasoned, steady hand to embrace the 'client enablement' approach, while assuring us that the process will accomplish the necessary outcomes."
Senior Executive at a Major Healthcare Company
Rondo Moses and Insurgence Group LLC have been Mabe’s strategic partner for more than seven years. The Insurgence Group team is highly professional, responsive, insightful, and laser-focused on shining a spotlight on the issues and decisions that matter. Rondo and his team were able to quickly understand our business model, its issues and drivers, and the external environment in which we compete. Insurgence Group applies this knowledge and deep expertise to help organizations like ours achieve sustainable growth through dynamic strategic planning, organization alignment, and strategy execution. Over successive planning cycles, under Insurgence Group’s leadership, steady guidance, and unwavering commitment, our leadership team has successfully evolved and enhanced our enterprise strategy process and achieved our growth and profitability goals. For these reasons, Insurgence Group is our trusted partner, the team we rely on to help us understand our business in the context of customers and the competitive environment. They’ve helped build strategic capabilities to succeed and thrive in an everchanging market. I highly recommend Rondo and the Insurgence Group team to companies looking to create and execute growth strategies.
Enrique Saiz Cueto Vice President, Strategic Planning & New Business Development Mabe, SA de CF
I hired Rondo and his team to help us create an integrated strategy management system that would generate concrete actions to address our two most important goals: improving operating margins and accelerating sales growth. With creativity, teamwork and continuous learning as guiding principles, Rondo and his team worked hard to customize an approach that fit our operating environment. They were quick learners of our issues and cultural norms, demonstrated empathy and strong listening skills in stakeholder interviews and group working sessions; and facilitated a process that resulted in a shared view of the strategy and excitement around how best to achieve it. Working together with the support of the leadership team, as well as a diverse group of division-level managers, we built consensus around a holistic view of the corporate strategy and defined a set of strategic objectives and metrics, including a portfolio of initiatives to further drive performance. As the focus shifted to cascading of the corporate strategy throughout the company, Rondo and his team also worked with the core project team and 22 division teams to articulate division-level strategies that were linked to achieving corporate goals. Rondo and his team were fully committed to our success. The customized client-centred approach they utilized, under his leadership, helped us to develop sustainable processes to drive our strategy execution.
Patrick McGuiness Former Senior Vice President, Finance, and Chief Financial Officer Tiffany & Co.
Pronto Software is Australia’s leading independent developer and provider of ERP and analytics solutions and has been in operation for over 40 years. In late 2020, the company undertook it’s most comprehensive strategic review ever, encompassing all areas of the business. We engaged Insurgence to assist us to manage the process, which would involve well over 50 people from within the business. I cannot speak highly enough of Matt Tice’s engagement throughout this time. We developed a close, trusted working relationship with Matt, who understood our culture and knew how to get the best from our people. He guided the teams, challenged their assumptions and kept us all focused. The result was a sea change in the way we saw the Pronto Software of the future and a solid plan for implementing our goals. The Company has been energised to create that future state, in close proximity to the customer. Since then, we have worked to see those visions and plans become a reality, and the team still talk about process with great enthusiasm as we work toward strategic realisation. I would recommend Matt Tice and Insurgence for their relatable style, professionalism, real world experience and above all, integrity.
Chad Gates, Managing Director, Pronto Software
“As our business transforms itself to manage the shift from print to cloud based software services, we engaged Matt Tice from Insurgence Group to help us develop and implement our strategy to manage this transition. Through this process we have been able to focus our efforts to enhance our position in the market and engage our staff to be part of the journey ahead. The Insurgence team partnered closely with me and my leadership team and provided us with expert guidance and support throughout. We look forward to working with Insurgence Group in the future.”
Russell Evans, CEO, Wolters Kluwer
Matt is a fantastic speaker and great at engaging a room. Through his insights he inspires participants to think differently and be bold. I attended a session run by Matt in late 2021 and was so taken I decided to ask Matt to run a similar but tailored session with our team. The feedback has been superb. The group realise more than ever we need to prepare for significant future change or we will lose our relevance. We developed real and tangible outcomes and actions. Five Star recommendation from me.
Ken Keenan, CEO, Pen Underwriting
“The Insurgence team has a unique ability to help clients navigate complex problems and focus these into a simple set of actionable solutions.”
BluCHP Limited, Charles Northcote - CEO
“Insurgence has been instrumental in helping our team to build a robust strategic plan, create leadership team alignment, and position us for execution success. Along the way they challenged us at each stage and worked hard to make sure we stayed on track and engaged.”
Jeff Soo, Managing Director, Terumo Australia
"Working with the Insurgence Team certainly challenged the leadership team thinking in terms of strategy. The challenges brought to the table greatly enhanced the strategic planning process. I would certainly recommend working with Matt and the Insurgence Team."
Raylee Carruthers, Chief Strategy Officer, Protech
"In my (too many) decades of being a CEO, I have had the privilege of seeing many consultants undertake planning sessions, and I have rarely seen a facilitator who brought so many insights, experience and vision to the process. Matt managed all the 'personalities', views and expectations exceptionally well, and the outcomes of the session will provide us with a clear strategic direction for the future."
Catherine Dale, Board Chair, Montsalvat
“Matthew’s approach and attention to detail was the key ingredients to a very successful go to market review for Capsifi. The professionalism and research that went into our company, encompassing the environment that Capsifi competes, gave the executive team a renewed sense of destination and achievement. Very productive body of work that will be leveraged and enhanced over time.”
Ian McAdam, CEO, Capsifi
Our Insights
Leadership Insurgence
One of the biggest issues facing most incumbent leaders (i.e., leaders at the helm of incumbent organisations) and well articulated by one of our recent clients, is “how do I navigate my organisation through disruption as the competitive equilibrium becomes more and more unstable?”.
Inclusive vs. Extractive Leadership
Over the summer holidays, I read an excellent book, entitled “Why Nations Fail” by Michele Boldrin, David K. Levine and Salvatore Modica. The main thesis of the book was that “inclusive” political and economic institutions have a much greater probability of long term success (i.e., are superior) as compared to “extractive”
Lessons from the 2016 US Presidential Election
Donald Trump shocked the world by defeating Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US Presidential Election. He will become the 45th President of the United States upon inauguration on January 20, 2017. While this moment is surreal for many in the global citizenry, especially for those living in the US, it should serve as a blaring siren or wake-up call for business leaders in established companies, also called incumbents.
Achieving Greater Results with Design Thinking
As a strategy consultant for the past twenty years, I have worked for dozens of market leading companies, from family-owned enterprises in Latin America to billion dollar behemoths with global brands and operations headquartered in the US. Most of these companies have been in business for at least as long as I have been in consulting. Like most companies that have been around for decades, they have experienced periods of steady growth, in top-line revenue and bottom-line earnings, as well as periods when these indicators have taken a hit.
Leading During Disruptive times
Leaders must view disruption as a learning opportunity for themselves and their teams. As you reflect on the pandemic and the prospect of future disruptive forces, seek to better understand what you should do to help your organization develop and sustain its capacity for transformational change.
The Secret Weapon to Reimagine Your Business for a Post-Pandemic World
Instead of seeing the crisis as an opportunity to reimagine and transform their business, many incumbents are looking forward to reverting to pre-covid-19 conditions. If this sounds like you, read on to learn what you can do to repivot and reimagine your organization.
6 Tips to Getting the Most Out of Your Offsites
As annual planning season reaches its peak, most organisations are gearing up to run their annual strategic planning workshops. This article provides several tips to help you get the most out of your planning offsites.
Making Lemonade from Lemons
Eight months into the global Covid-19 pandemic, the level of disruption in the business landscape has presented challenges for companies large and small. During the early days of the pandemic, companies focused on what they must do to survive. After several months spent ensuring the safety and well-being of employees and managing cashflow, including reducing expenses, many pivoted, turning their attention to delivering value to customers and growing their customer base. For example, restaurants that primarily operated as an in-person dining business made the wise transition to scaled-down menus and launched or expanded their takeout or delivery services. Some restaurants chose to partner with new takeout and delivery businesses, providing the ghost kitchen that supplied the food while they focused on promotion/marketing, customer acquisition, and order fulfillment.
The Innovation Imperative of Insurgent Companies
As the saying goes, “necessity is the mother of invention” or, said another way, “when the need for something becomes imperative, you are forced to find ways of getting or achieving it.”
Unstable Strategy
After working for more than 20 years helping companies design and execute strategy, it is now obvious to me that strategy is undergoing a profound change. More and more as we work with clients we find that the traditional strategy methods are starting to break down. Whilst I am not suggesting that everything we have learned over this period about strategy is invalid, I am suggesting that things are fundamentally different. Much of what we learned about strategy applies to organisations operating in a relatively stable macro economic/competitive context. In a straw-poll survey of more than 350 CEOs across multiple industries taken by Insurgence in 2016, more than 85% of CEOs agreed that the environment in which they compete is highly dynamic and unstable and set to become more so over the coming years. One of the analogies often used to illustrate strategy is chess. In chess, each player occupies half of the board at the start of the game with the goal of ultimately and totally defeating the competition. This is a useful analogy because competition closely mirrors a game of chess in several important ways; there is a winner, there is a playing field (i.e., the chessboard) and the game requires a balance of strategy and tactics to create advantage. This is the essence of strategy. If I move, you countermove. I sacrifice a pawn to take your knight. You introduce a new product; I follow or counter. I enter a new market; you attack me in my home market. This all works very well in a stable system where the players are known and the rules of the game are well established. I often share this analogy with business leaders, and, inevitably, a hand goes up and someone says but that’s now how things work any more!. Of course the question itself is a trap and the discussion typically gets quite lively. What’s changed?, I always ask. The first answer is always that the game is being played by multiple players, its not as simple as the Coke vs. Pepsi battles of yesteryear, there are multiple players on the board all trying to win. Most leaders generally agree with this, but someone always argues that this has always been the case, what’s different is that it is becoming more and more difficult to determine with whom we are competing with.Usually what comes next is someone then mentions - it’s like we are playing chess on the ocean with ten foot waves!. In other words, the ground underneath the board is constantly shifting. After some more lively debate, someone almost always get to the heart of the problem with the core analogy itself –actually, the real problem is that we are playing chess, and so is our traditional competition, but more and more competitors are coming on the scene that aren’t playing chess so much as playing a totally different game, with different rules and different assumptions."
Strategy, in stable systems, does look a lot like chess. In unstable systems, if you are playing chess against someone else playing go, how would you know if you were winning? Most of what we have learned about strategy applies to the former case, not the latter. If you are still in an industry where the rules are predictable, the competition set, the assumptions static, congratulations – keep playing chess. For the rest of us, a new approach is required, our very survival depends on it.
To learn more about strategy in unstable systems, please contact us and we will be happy to share our perspectives with you.
Strategy Execution in the Age of Disruption
I have spent much of my career helping organisations to execute strategy and have found that the execution of strategy is one of the most challenging things executives can face.
Macroscopic Innovation
In a series of stand up surveys of more than 350 CEOs conducted January to June 2016, we asked about the importance of innovation, i.e., how important is innovation to your current and future success?
Customer Proximity
One of the principal characteristics that set insurgents apart from incumbents, is the close proximity to customers (and more broadly the market) that insurgents develop. Customer Proximity can be described as the mean distance from the firm to the customer (i.e., the market place).
Leadership Insurgence
One of the biggest issues facing most incumbent leaders (i.e., leaders at the helm of incumbent organisations) and well articulated by one of our recent clients, is “how do I navigate my organisation through disruption as the competitive equilibrium becomes more and more unstable?”.
Inclusive vs. Extractive Leadership
Over the summer holidays, I read an excellent book, entitled “Why Nations Fail” by Michele Boldrin, David K. Levine and Salvatore Modica. The main thesis of the book was that “inclusive” political and economic institutions have a much greater probability of long term success (i.e., are superior) as compared to “extractive”
Lessons from the 2016 US Presidential Election
Donald Trump shocked the world by defeating Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US Presidential Election. He will become the 45th President of the United States upon inauguration on January 20, 2017. While this moment is surreal for many in the global citizenry, especially for those living in the US, it should serve as a blaring siren or wake-up call for business leaders in established companies, also called incumbents.
Achieving Greater Results with Design Thinking
As a strategy consultant for the past twenty years, I have worked for dozens of market leading companies, from family-owned enterprises in Latin America to billion dollar behemoths with global brands and operations headquartered in the US. Most of these companies have been in business for at least as long as I have been in consulting. Like most companies that have been around for decades, they have experienced periods of steady growth, in top-line revenue and bottom-line earnings, as well as periods when these indicators have taken a hit.
Leading During Disruptive times
Leaders must view disruption as a learning opportunity for themselves and their teams. As you reflect on the pandemic and the prospect of future disruptive forces, seek to better understand what you should do to help your organization develop and sustain its capacity for transformational change.
The Secret Weapon to Reimagine Your Business for a Post-Pandemic World
Instead of seeing the crisis as an opportunity to reimagine and transform their business, many incumbents are looking forward to reverting to pre-covid-19 conditions. If this sounds like you, read on to learn what you can do to repivot and reimagine your organization.
6 Tips to Getting the Most Out of Your Offsites
As annual planning season reaches its peak, most organisations are gearing up to run their annual strategic planning workshops. This article provides several tips to help you get the most out of your planning offsites.
Making Lemonade from Lemons
Eight months into the global Covid-19 pandemic, the level of disruption in the business landscape has presented challenges for companies large and small. During the early days of the pandemic, companies focused on what they must do to survive. After several months spent ensuring the safety and well-being of employees and managing cashflow, including reducing expenses, many pivoted, turning their attention to delivering value to customers and growing their customer base. For example, restaurants that primarily operated as an in-person dining business made the wise transition to scaled-down menus and launched or expanded their takeout or delivery services. Some restaurants chose to partner with new takeout and delivery businesses, providing the ghost kitchen that supplied the food while they focused on promotion/marketing, customer acquisition, and order fulfillment.
Our Partners
